Jewish Insider: Daily Kickoff: Chatting with Craig from Craigslist + Biden advisors on annexation and why he’d leave the embassy in Jerusalem
HEARD YESTERDAY: Campaign surrogates highlight Biden’s opposition to annexation
In a webcast hosted by the Jewish Democratic Council of America, Sen. Chris Coons (D-DE) and Joe Biden’s senior foreign policy advisor Tony Blinken discussed how a Biden administration would address a unilateral move by the incoming Israeli government to apply sovereignty to Jewish communities in the West Bank.
Naming allies: “My hope would be that Ashkenazi as foreign minister and Gantz as defense minister — in what will be internal deliberations — given their deep experience in the IDF and given the security consequences of an abrupt move, would caution Bibi [Netanyahu] against some significant step like this,” Coons said.
Wait-and-see approach: The Delaware senator, a surrogate for the Biden campaign, declined to elaborate on how a Biden administration would address annexation. “It’s hard to exactly prejudge the circumstances on the ground as of January of next year, and we only have one president at a time,” he asserted. Coons added that as a member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, it is important for him to not only express his views “clearly and strongly, but to also be measured about putting any constraints on what a Biden administration would look like.”
Reserving judgment: Blinken, who served in the Obama administration as a national security official and deputy secretary of state, said on the webcast that he was “not going to prejudge what we might do or not do in the context of a Biden administration because “lots of things can happen between now and then.” But he stressed that the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee “has been literally opposed to annexation,” on the record several times.
Jerusalem embassy: Blinken suggested that a Biden administration would keep the U.S. embassy in Jerusalem, telling viewers that reversing President Donald Trump’s decision and moving it back to Tel Aviv “would not make sense practically and politically.”